Metal whistle helps lead firefighters to lost hikers

Firefighter Gary Brown Jr. almost dismissed the faint sound he heard while looking out on a remote stretch of the Green River Gamelands with two fellow members of a search and rescue team.

Sitting in the driveway of a home high on Scarlet Mountain Road, Brown thought, “Maybe I’m just hearing things. It was almost like a squeal. It was so far off, and I heard banging (from construction) down the road, so I wasn’t real sure.”

But Brown’s persistent ear and a metal whistle eventually helped lead him and two fellow volunteers to two lost hikers who had gone missing the day before in a steep, wild area between Deep Gap Road and Big Hungry Road.

Jonathan Heatherly, 32, and Janice Collins, 56, left family property near the top of Laurel Mountain View Road — along with Collins’ husband, Glenn — about 1 p.m. Saturday for a day hike, intending to head home by dark.

“The two hikers had gotten ahead of Mr. Collins because he had stopped to talk with someone on the trail,” said Capt. Lowell Griffin of the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office. “When he wasn’t able to catch up, he decided to turn back and wait for them to come out of the woods.”

But the pair never returned, causing family members to worry as darkness fell. Glenn Collins had backtracked with the only compass and cellphone, Griffin said, and the two hikers possessed only a bottle of water each and a walking stick.

A massive search-and-rescue operation ensued early Sunday involving roughly 100 people from every county fire department, a dozen dog teams, paramedics, law officers and a helicopter from the state highway patrol in Raleigh.

“When we found them, I said they better thank God, because He put them there at the right place and the right time,” said Brown, a paid Hendersonville firefighter who was volunteering Sunday for Blue Ridge Fire and Rescue, where his father is chief.

On Sunday afternoon, Brown and fellow Blue Ridge volunteer Johnny Hill, along with Edneyville Fire and Rescue volunteer Mike Ostrander, had parked their Ranger ATV at a driveway on Scarlet Mountain Road to allow a search dog team to get ahead of them.

It was there that something caught Brown’s ear, what he thought was “a faint yell down the mountain.” He initially shrugged it off as noise from one of the nearby homes.

Ten minutes later, he heard the sound again, so the search team walked down the road to “get away from the noise, and I heard it again. And this time I could tell it was below us.”

Standing at a gate to the “old Posey Henderson place,” Brown decided to try blowing a metal coach’s whistle he keeps clipped to his backpack.

“I usually carry that in case I get lost,” he said. “It’s good for scaring bears off and stuff like that.”

Brown started blowing the shrill coach’s whistle as loudly as he could. “And a couple of seconds later, I could definitely hear them yell, ‘Help!’ ” After difficulties radioing the command center, the three firefighters descended a road to a field where an old hunting cabin sits. The cries for help were growing louder as they went behind the cabin, Brown said.

Snake

Leaving Hill at the cabin for reference, Brown and Ostrander started down a windy logging road toward a creek bottom, following the cries for help.

“On one of the first curves, we ran into a rattlesnake,” Brown said.

Skirting past it, they reached an overgrown creek and crossed over it on some old logs into a rhododendron thicket, where they spotted Heatherly and Collins coming toward them.

“They were kind of worn out,” Brown said. “The first thing they said when I got to them was, ‘Where are we at?’ It’s mostly all private (land) in there, but the gamelands bump up to it on both sides.”

After being rescued, Heatherly told authorities he and Collins had kept on hiking Saturday even after it got dark.

“I think that’s what pushed them off the trail,” Griffin said. Disoriented by the darkness, the pair decided to build a fire for the night and try to find their way out in the morning, Griffin said.

“Once it got light, Mr. Heatherly said he couldn’t recognize anything,” Griffin said. So the pair decided to drop down and try to find a creek they could follow out to a familiar trail or road. That’s when the search team located them, Griffin said.

Dana Fire and Rescue Chief Ben Lanning, who coordinated the search, praised the cooperation of everyone who participated in Sunday’s hunt.

“It was a well-orchestrated, team effort from everybody in Henderson County, from law enforcement to the Rescue Squad to EMS and the fire marshal’s office,” he said. “Sunday is everybody’s day off, but we had people from every (fire) department show up to help. And the big thing was we found them.”